Zbrush project - Hobbler troll

 

After studying “Anatomy for 3D Artists: The Essential Guide for CG Professionals” and “ZBrush Creature Design: Creating Dynamic Concept Imagery for Film and Games”, I wanted to try out making my first 3D model of a creature. The creature in question is a hobbler troll.

 

Unlike many of the Gretchen Goosander creatures, I have never drawn an initial concept for a hobbler troll before. This is because hobbler trolls do not appear often in the story book and only appear as minor characters. The most I have thought of for the hobbler troll is the following description;

“If you can imagine a humanoid pug with skin like rotting bark, that’s a hobbler troll in a nutshell.”

But I want to be more experimental with this concept outside of just “humanoid pug”. I want to demonstrate the workflow of coming up with a creature concept for zbrush as well as see just how much human and creature anatomy I have managed to remember. This workflow will be similar to what I did with the unicorn girl, only this time I will be using zbrush mostly.

To begin with, I design the creature using thumbnails and sketches. This is recommended in the Zbrush creature design book which gives a number of ways to go about doing this, but I go with old-fashioned pencil and paper since this is quicker for me. Meanwhile, I play music that fits the character (as suggested by the Zbrush book) and I also look at a good number of pug and rotting bark references. Before going into this, I had already gone through numerous books that have helped inspire the design. These are;

·       Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastic World around You.

·       The Natural History book.

·       Animals Real and Imagined

·       Faeries

·       The Goblins of Labyrinth.

These books have been created by experienced creature designers, biologists and illustrators such as Tony Diterlizzi, Brian Froud and Terryl Whitlatch and I have learnt a lot about character appeal and design from them. Meanwhile, I am always keeping in mind the character’s gesture, weight-distribution, form, presence, personality and appeal. The anatomy is important for grounding, but all of these other character design principles are probably more urgent and need to be tackled first.

I went through a lot of initial designs for the hobbler troll. The third picture down was the image I ended up liking the most as it was simple and effective, though I still explored other design ideas from there until I couldn't think of any more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did the final design in Photoshop and started playing around with colour schemes. I quite like a lot of these, though some are a little bland while others don't really fit the idea I had in mind. The third, 10th and 11th troll designs are the ones I prefer, though I could only go with one for the final design which ended up being the 11th.

 

 

Here are some progression screenshots.

 

 

 

 

 

And this is the final design! I closely followed instructions from the Zbrush creature design book to achieve this and I am happy with the final result.